this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2024
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Yup.
I have likened it to an immune system: fighting bacteria is way easier than fighting cancer. The ratio of sizes of Bacterial cells to Human cells is like a football to a football stadium, and their surfaces look extremely different, nor do bacteria even so much as try to blend in to look like their host cells (though they do put out a slimy coating to obscure their origins in the more general sense). So when the human immune system sees non-human cells somewhere they shouldn't, like inside your anatomical tissues, it goes all-out WAR on those bitches, and just obliterates everything.
In contrast, cancer cells not only look like, but they actually are YOUR CELLS - they are YOU! With just one tiny little alteration, hardly worth noticing, in that they no longer pay attention to the signals to halt, cease & desist growing anymore. They do what they fucking want, when they want, how they want, and never mind that their actions will (not offer "a chance of", but a 100% certainty guarantee) kill themselves, it will also kill the organism as well, essentially taking it down with it. So all that "foreign detection apparatus", which can eliminate bacteria, mold, non-human eukaryotes like amoeba, nonliving particles like dust, also the in-between stuff like viruses, none of that helps, when fighting against cancer.
And that hasn't even begun to get into HIV, where those immune processes are themselves subverted... when the police refuse to police the police, then how can the work of policing happen? (answer: it does not, and the body dies, far more often than not, unless some external intervention can prevent that outcome)
There is a reason why people say that the only party slightly less worse than Republicans are Democrats. Although that might have something to do with the whole "2-party" system...:-P - but it does convey that neither party aim to be correct, so much as to just win. Also, whatever happened to just being "Americans"? Like, regardless of what party put you into office, once you get there, don't (or rather, shouldn't) you belong to the citizenry at large and need to represent all of your people, even those who voted for your opponent(s)? So like a Senator would represent a single state's interests, and a President or Supreme Court Justice would represent the entire nation's at large, etc. Enshittification is not just a term for capitalistic corporations, but applies to society at large - i.e. whatever higher functions were once meant to happen, have now been subverted by more basic lower processes like greed and corruption and such.
Which makes sense - entropy doesn't decrease for simply no reason (although that said, an open system does have quite a bit of wiggle room to play around in), and Maslov's hierarchy of needs tends to revert to the lower, more basic ones when necessary, the higher ones only opening up when the lower ones are already met.
How all this relates to what you said: people are stupid, and more importantly short-sighted. When the people entrusted with something become no longer worthy of that trust... that is the most dangerous thing of all to the survival of an organism. On the other hand, what are we going to do about it - just sit back and watch it die? For my part, I promote video sources such as Innuendo Studios, Kurzgesagt, Crash Course, etc. that have acted to step up in the wake of the demise of trust in our "official" media, but ofc there is no magic bullet, no one-solution-fits-all that is going to solve the enormous scope of the problem (and if there were, it would likely be taken out by an aggressive competitor or malicious actor, so would not last for long). Meh, oh well, I've made my peace that I cannot hold out even the remotest hope that it can all be solved, yet I still do my part b/c that is all that I can, and therefore must, do.
Well, having lived in a country with actual Proportional Vote, I would say that the "just win" mindset is derived from the two party system you get in First Past The Post representative allocation systems like the US, probably with a pinch of the higher aggressiveness of baseline American culture.
That said, I don't think the aggressive "just win" posture we see reflects them being different, quite the contrary: it's Theatre for the masses because the two sides of the Power Duopoly are too similar, so lots of posturing with loud disagreements serves to both keep their own tribe (the people whose relation to politics is similar to their relation to sports: they have chosen a "team") inspired and acting as unthinking supporters and keeping the rest of people thinking there is true competition when there really isn't. This is why most of the fight is happening in the Moral field (stuff like LGBT rights) rather than anything to do with Power, Wealth and Quality Of Life - in the things that matter the most for those politicians both parties think the same, leaving only the things they don't genuinelly care about as the field in which put one a very loud, very dramatic theatrical play about how difference they are.
By the way, I liked your idea of using "enshittification" for Society and Politics and I hope you don't mind if I use it in my own posts.
Personally my own approach to help change things is to go around pointing the inconsitencies out to get at least some people thiking about it. I'm also a member of a small political party in the country I lived in and was also in one back when I lived in Britain (though there it's a lot like the US and, frankly, at best things will need to get a lot worse before people are pissed of enough to change them).
I understand what you are saying, and in the past I would have agreed with you, except for two more recent alterations. Nothing is ofc all entirely one way or another, everything is on a continuum, and so even those alterations are based upon the backdrop of... yes, what you said: "political theater".
First, looking not at the words that candidates say but rather at their actions following the election, politicians from the 70s, 80s, and 90s were as you describe. e.g. George W. Bush, despite running on the "conservative" ticket, was a progressive! And Hillary Rodham Clinton was the most pro-war, pro-big business Democrat that I have ever even so much as heard of. What you are saying used to be true, back in the day. Say whatever you need to in order to get elected, then go about the real business at hand, of getting shit done.
The first change though was the Tea Party (e.g. Ted Cruz, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, there's a whole list if you expand the right-hand show/hide boxes on that wikipedia page link). They got radicalized somehow, and replaced the old-guard who actually knew how to compromise, instead doing things like sending letters overseas to sabotage ongoing negotations (I am not a lawyer, but looking up the old-timey definition, the word "treason" literally includes exactly that scenario as part of its definition!), and ofc the imfamous "shutting down the entire government" trick, holding the budget hostage until and unless they get their way - not the "American" way, no not that, but their way specifically b/c that is all that matters to them. Obviously prior Republicans had done all that this new breed were also looking to do, but the difference seems to be in the degree of obstinancy, and the eagerness to immediately knaw off the USA's own legs just in order to spite the head - like for them, it is not the absolute last, final choice, but rather their second choice every time. They have done more filibustering, more blocking, more obstructionism than any modern party in the history of anyone alive in the USA (I have heard), and fun fact: even the Congress that functioned during the Civil War managed to pass more bills than a Congress involved with the Tea Party (obviously due to a technicality, where the southern democrats left in a huff, leaving the northern republicans to pass whatever they wanted free of interference:-P). Thus began the major Power Creep trend of modern obstructionism & enshittification - yes please feel free to use as you like, b/c if the shoe fits...:-D
But even before that trend could either snuff itself out or be subsumed by more old-guard politicians who actually want the government to be functional, the Alt-Right started to rise to power. This new breed... seems less concerned with "getting their way", and more about simply burning everything to the fucking ground. Donald Trump has moved beyond obstructionism, to the point where if he does not get his way, a literal (if horribly inept) coup attempt was tried, and it remains to be seen if he, or one of the other followers of that movement will start a literal, actual, physical Civil War. e.g. Marjorie Taylor Greene has literally called for this - in a not-joking manner.
This is far past theater is what I am saying, yes in the past it was that, but now, at this point, we are well past that. America could literally fall as a democratic nation - and most experts (I have read) seem to agree that some kind of "constitutional crisis event" is imminent in the next 5-10 years. These people are far past playing around.
Kudos for being part of the solution where you are at. Similar to the UK, where I don't know what could possibly reverse the effects of Brexit - that damage seems irreparable and permanent, it only remains to move forward from here on out and try to avoid further harm (in that case, not the end of a nation, but metrics are already revealing that it ushered in a sharp decline of its prominence?) - in the USA I don't know what can be done to save it from its self-inflited injuries, given how many people seem hell-bent on ending it.
At a minimum though, it seems like it would have to begin with education, since currently the major differences seem to be about alternate sets of "facts" - e.g. does the COVID vaccine work, or does it rather harm you, making boys infertile, etc.? "Trust" in the media has been lost, in large part b/c literal pastors/priests/ministers have been promoting politics from behind their pulpits, thus mixing in the messages from religion to the point where it is becoming more of a "christian holy jihad" war than a logically-reasoned one where both sides are attempting to "get their way". For that, pointing out inconsisties might help, but even then, people seem to already KNOW that they are wrong, and yet simply do not care.
Like if you look at Trump, there is simply no way to honestly call him "God's man" (plus, if anyone who is placed in charge can be that, then why wasn't Obama "God's man" too?), but there seems to be a sense of "even though that's not fully true, still supporting him is the right thing to do regardless". A LOT of people seem to value "argument by authority" over what they see literally with their own eyes. And I get it: these matters - economics, geopolitics, treaties, climate change, pandemics - they can get quite complex, and many just want daddy to take care of them. Which in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, etc. they legit did do! B/c the interests of the wealthy happened to align with the interests of the nation overall - other countries were bombed by Germany and the USA was riding high, so its success meant their own personal success too, plus all the engineers & scientists were creating wonderful new gadgets that were fun & helpful too. However, with globalization and automation that alignment is no longer true, and they are instead taking whatever they can get, seemingly with an exit strategy in place to sit back and watch as climate change happens and the world simply burns.
It seems extremely short-sighted to me - especially if a nation such as the USA could bend its enormous might towards literally halting or even reversing the effects of climate change? But, such thinking is a remnant of past days, and now multi-national corporations such as Alphabet and Apple and Meta are more powerful than the US government itself, so it seems that they now see it as a competitor and are at least allowing, sometimes rooting, occasionally even participating in taking it down. e.g. FaceBook's sources of "alternative facts" helping to shatter the, as you pointed out, already quite brittle remaining trust that people had in the news media.
This is all a lot, but I hope it has been an interesting read? :-D
Well, I think that church pastors replacing the Press as authoritative sources is not at all unexpected, though I don't think that's part of the cause of loss of trust in the Press, I think it's in part a consequence and in part something that already happenned.
My home country - Portugal - was Fascist until 1974 and the Fascist Regime used the Church (which around here was 100% Catholic) through the perceive authority of priests, to tell people what to believe in matters that were social, economic and even political rather than religious, especially in the northern part of the country. This was especially easy because most people were either illiterate or close to it.
It's funny that you mention the Tea Party: For some years now I've been convinced that we live in the time of the fall of Ideologies, in that the fully defined Ideologies from the early XX century that included visions for how the country should be, keen awareness of how Power works, their own specific folklore of visual elements and even specific language (say: the overuse of "proletariat"), and other such things, such as Fascism and Communist, were pretty much dead and buried in the West by the mid/late XX century and were replaced by the "laisser faire" of neoliberalism which doesn't really has a vision for the future, is all about The Economy never about Power or People (even though it's definitelly about Money being the one and only Power, though that's not how it sells itself) and is sold to us very much as a hands off "que será, será" way of managing a nation.
What we've seen in the late XX century and onwards was the rise of Politics being done using Marketing - saying what people want to hear, moment by moment, using techniques from Marketing to determine what to say and measure impact (such as focus groups), changing what's said if people change in what they want to hear (hence said politicians often being accused of flip-flopping), all of which to obtain powder and use it I ways that have nothing to do with what voters wanted. This is still how to this day the Democrat Party works and ditto the modern Labour Party in the UK (aka New Labour).
I think the Tea Party was a reboot of traditional ideology in the US and I actually think the Republicans are at the moment the only party with an actual ideology (not a good one, but one none the less).
Mind you this doesn't mean it's not still theatre for the politicians involved (maybe circus would be a better word), it's just that their beast is as much theirs as it is the crowd's and they're forced to give the crowd what it wants, which started as something they've convinced the crowd they wanted but then the crowd took it, made it its own and changed it (look at the whole anti-vax movement for COVID which is pretty senseless and how things like anti-mask which is even more senseless came out of it).
I think Republican politicians are just as fake as Democrats, but they're ridding a bull, not controlling a donkey with the promise of carrot and at times the use of a stick like the Democrats, so you get a lot more loud circus from the former and at times they are dragged into things far beyond what they wanted.
Last but not least there is a true market of ideas within the present day Republican party and the politicians competing for attention in that market are each doing it by trying to be more loud and outrageous that the rest. Meanwhile the Democrat party has used procedural tricks internally to make sure a handful of people control who gets the top positions, so there is no markt of ideas in there hence the party keeps being led by bland politcians who use techniques from Marketimg to control public oerception and voters.
And yeah, I think that, like in Britain, things will go too far and the US will end up doing something it cannot undo. Then again I think the US has been in a post-imperial decay path since the 80s, same as inevitably happenned to all nations that were once great powers.
I very much love your whole message there of "those who are not aware of their history are doomed to repeat it". 100% that is true, and as I now believe, it is not ignorance that is being fought against, but obstinacy - e.g. those January 6th rioters who stormed the White House, they were not merely ignorant when they showed up ready to "defend the Constitution", since they had made the full-on actual choice to not read that document first-hand, nor bother to discern what it meant.
In case you haven't watched yet, John Oliver has a fascinating Last Week Tonight special on "Authoritarianism" that has been steadily rising all across the globe. You already know that, but it is an interesting watch nonetheless:-).
What worries me about these movements having an "identity" is that one, the identity seems to be defined almost solely in opposition to "the other side", as in so long as the other side loses, then "we win"... except that is not true, b/c the reality is that we all lose, when America grinds to an absolute halt. A perfect example of that is the "anti-abortion" movement, ironically called "pro-life", except it is killing and endangering women in many states. Even if we took for granted that abortion straight up equals murder, with no room for wiggle room in that discussion, that still does not explain things like why doctors are not allowed to remove already-necrotic tissue from a miscarriage, or those weird events like a fetus in Texas that had a giant fluid-filled sack where a brain would normally appear, or even just run-of-the-mill cancer, if it happens to be in the uterus. Not all actions of "removing tissue from a uterus" are equivalent to "abortions" - and does not explain how failing to provide medical care to a woman is not also a form of "murder"? i.e., having a stance against something is not the same thing as "having a stance"... not really, not "fully" - I mean, yes, you've prevented one form of "murder", but at the expense of introducing another form of it, WTF!? The sheer incompetence of someone who flunked out of school as a child thinking that they know more than literal medical doctors that spent decades of their life learning that profession!?!
But as you say, that grew out of the earlier events where people had already stopped listening to the "authoritative" sources. At which point they became vulnerable to listening to... "alternative" sources of authoritarian-sounding sources. I LOVE your analogy of controlling the donkey with a carrot and Repubs a bull - I've used that myself so I wholeheartedly agree (the caveat being that often the carrot never actually arrives - just like the analogy seems to suggest too!).
What worries me most is that this is not something "new", since the 80s, but rather something very, VERY old, as in somewhat mathematical, predating humanity itself, and even Earth itself in the sense of representing a fundamental law of how the universe works. And if that is true, then I think this nation might be well & truly fucked? B/c if the most powerful people within it are no longer invested in its success, then they will take what they can get from it ofc, but they will no longer give back, seeing no reason to - and the loss of that incentivization seems to me to spell out a doom spiral to the ending? I am talking about e.g. Rules for Rulers by CGP Grey, where "corruption" isn't a flaw in a system, but instead a feature, and we ignore that at our peril.
You see Neoliberalism is also a form of Authoritarianism, or more precisely it's a way of transforming Democracy into Oligarchy.
And it's actually quite simple if subtle:
The effect is achieved via the capture, subversion and/or nullification of the mechanisms of the State within Democracy rather bloody revolution, and people are kept in their place using techniques from Modern Psychology and Marketing to prey on human cognitive weaknesses (tribalism, information overload, emotion-driven action, familiarity, halo effect and so many others) rather than force (though at times, that too: look at how Obama suppressed Occupy Wall Street) but ultimatelly it anchores itself on the same principles.
And if you look around with a different perspective you see a lot of the things from John Oliver's segment:
From this pespective the fight in the US is not between leftwing and rightwing, not even close, it's between Oligarchy and Fascism. It is thus unsurprising how so many Americans feel powerless: they are powerless as the fight is really between two different models of Power were wealthy elites control everything and hence it's mainly a fight between two side of the elites were the rest are but pawns.
Which is why people rolled the dice on Trump - b/c the only other alternative was Hillary Clinton, so people chose to play Russian Roulette rather than that known quantity.
I need to update the words I use - e.g. I have been calling that "plutocracy", but yeah neoliberalism seems to mean essentially the same thing? In the end at least. I really don't like that word though, b/c it is basically the polar opposite of "liberal" - which I think is perhaps by design, as in describing people who present themselves as "liberal" but by virtue of being "neoliberal" they are the opposite.
That aside though, I also do not like it b/c that leads to a word creep, b/c what will come after that - post-neoliberalism? Nouveau-neoliberalism? :-) We are seeing the same effect with neoconservatism as well - as in, what the hell does it even mean!? And especially, how is neoconservatism any different from neoliberalism, especially when both devolve to mean the same thing as plutocracy!?
Wording aside though, absolutely yes: press bought with money, check, judiciary too, check (though it arguably took longer, and I think not strictly speaking in the precise manner in which you said but... yes, there's no use quibbling intricacies when it amounts to the same end of agreement).
What did you think of the CGP Grey's Rules for Rulers video? If you have any suggestions for a video to watch after that one, I am interested. That one messed me up, emotionally, and I still am not past it, b/c it highlights, as you said, that there IS no fixing this - this is simply how it is going to be, from now on. The Golden Era in the USA that, regardless of whether it truly even existed (expecially for e.g. black people), is definitely over. As soon as corporations started to amass more power than people could ever hope to - e.g. people die, and have to breathe, eat, sleep, etc., but corporations have special exemptions that give them super-human status, essentially making them Giants in the land of us mere pawn-style Humans. Even the CEOs of those institutions are helpless before their might, if the Board of Directors were to want to get rid of them.
We are fast becoming slaves to corporations, and while government was the only thing rivaling their strength, the power of misinformation seems to be reducing those hallowed institutions to weak ghosts of their former selves, or rather more like a cancer patient, barely able to move their arms a bit and even that ability fast waning until there will soon be nothing left. The wasps have laid eggs in the brain of this caterpillar, and when they finish hatching and eating us from the inside there will be nothing left. Nor will revolution likely work, when they have all of nukes and drones on their side and the rest of the people have... what, possibly slightly better AI? Even which weapons will end up being used in that fight seem to have not yet been defined.
At this point, maybe we should put all our hope into the EU to save democracy? :-P But if so, it won't be for everyone, and I think the USA is probably too far gone... :-(
Yeah, that's exactly what I think happenned in the US to elect Trump.
Agree that the words do not mean what they seem, but then again what else is new: NAZI stands for National Socialist German Workers' Party and at least 2 of those things are the opposite of what they really stood for. The misnaming of political parties and ideologies is probably a hill not worth dying on, IMHO.
I like and agree with the Rules for Rulers video, though I think it oversimplifies things, especially in Democracies: if it was that simple, why is there such a massive difference in median quality of life and wealth between the US and, say, Sweden or why has oil-rich Norway not turned in to a Dictatorship, or why the difference between present day US and 1960s US - same country, same rules, yet hugelly different wealth distribution, quality of life and social mobility levels.
Clearly there are a lot more factors at least in Democracy.
Not that I think that video is wrong - I can actually see a lot of that in my own country both before and after Fascism was overthrown - I just think it's not enough to explain everything.
Can't really recomend any other videos: I've built my views on politics from reading a lot in quite a number of subjects (Finance, Behavioural Economics, Psychology, Mathematics and so on) as well as crossed with my life experience including membership in political parties. I don't think this is easilly replicable and it would most definitelly not fit a couple of videos, which given the very pressures of seeking Youtube views and aimed for audience means the videos by need be very simplified views of reality.
As for Corporations, never forget that they do not have a will of their own - it's all people doing the choices behind the veil of the corporation and those choices are made for the personal upside maximization of those people, even if only indirectly (which is why you see massive CEO payouts when it's seldom in the best interest of the corporation). IMHO, the personification of corporation is a trick in Modern Capitalism meant to help deflect the blame away from the decision-makers within the corporation to the corporate entity itself, which is how for example a CEO of an airplane maker can decide to cut corners in the building of their planes, leading to hundreds of avoidable deaths, and yet instead of the CEO ending up in jail for Manslaughter it's the company that ends up paying a fine - the system all the way through levels of the State such as the Legislative and Judiciary are set-up to stop certain elite from getting punished in the same way as non-elites would and the Press often cooperates by going on and on about the Corporation itself and never mention the CEO(s) who made the decision.
(I suspect that the solution for the current problems with corporations is simply going after the individuals themselves making the decisions in the name of the corporations. I'm probably not the only one who thinks so, which is why you often see people on the Internet advocating for prision sentences for CEOs of corporations for the crimes who for public consumption are attributed to the corporations)
I would be more worried about dynastic hold on Power and Money than explicitly about corporation, as corporations are simply agents and façades for those holding power.
Plutocracy means what it says it means - so not all words have be designed poorly, it is we who allow them to get away with it. Then again, how are we going to go to the nazis and tell them to change the name they use to refer to themselves?:-P On the other hand, we could call them what they are: fascists.
You asked why there is such a difference b/t Sweden vs. the USA, and I think the answer is simple: the former is a democracy, whereas the latter is not. The latter calls itself one, but that is merely a convenient fiction for something that is more trule rather a plutocracy. I don't know how Norway has managed to remain so awesome - it has truly been a sight to behold though:-).
Back to the USA, the difference as I mentioned was the rise of "corporations" in the late 1970s: prior to that, if someone owned a "company", like Mr. Smith's paper mill, and he did something bad, then they could come and take it from him, plus also his actual house. However nowadays those limited liability organizations allow him to do whatever he pleases, confident that the LLC (Limited Liability Corporation) will take the fall, while he retains all of the privileges. At the highest levels, someone can live the lifestyle of a FABULOUSLY wealthy person - driving the best cars, flying around to their private jets and traveling not by car but by helicopter to & from it, to their personal private building where they live in the penthouse suites, eating the best foodstuffs and sampling all the best products, all while the corporation pays the taxes - at a significantly lower rate than a human being would - and shoulders all the liability concerns. And sure, occasionally they will pay the human a million dollars here or there, but that is a pittance compared to the multimillion-dollar lifestyle they live in perpetuity, offered by the corporation. We created these legal fictions to exist "above" us, we the people, and now they live... above us, while we suffer along barely able to eat.
Anyway that Rules for Rulers video was never meant to explain everything, just one of the various rules - i.e. it helps people to avoid falling into one of the various common traps.
I disagree about corporations though: the USA Supreme Court itself has stipulated that "corporations are people", and moreover they are abstract entities that exist semi-independently from humans. Yes, humans are involved, but like cells in a body, whereas the corporation is more than the sum of all of them combined. e.g. if a CEO dies, it can be replaced, while the corporation moves ever onwards. Sometimes it may act in accordance aligned perfectly with the will of a particular CEO, but other times not - e.g. if the Board directs otherwise. It is not the only such entity, human families may act likewise: sometimes a dad may be in charge, other times a mom, still other times the children take the lead, e.g. perhaps they are put in charge of deciding where the entire family will go for a vacation; and there too the components are replacable, e.g. if a father dies and a step-father comes in to fill the gap, but the "family" abstract entity will go on, never quite being the same, but then again it's never the same from one year to the next in any case.
But getting back to corporations: they DO have a will, and that will is to seek profits, at any cost. Like a zombie constantly eating flesh, even picking up the food that fell out of its own deteriorated body that could not hold it, a corporation just nom-noms forever, regardless of whether it has been successful or failed in the past, it always marches on towards the direction of profits. Though, like the human abstract concept of "family", yes it too receives input from its component parts, even as it also takes on a semi-independence beyond that as well. I probably am horribly botching this explanation, b/c it almost sounds like I am disagreeing with you, but what I am intending is to say that corporations are not solely limited to being made up of humans: they also have something inherent within themselves. For example, if the exact same humans within an LLC would behave differently in a non-LLC, where they could be held personally responsible for their actions, then that is the difference that the "corporation" aspect made.
Though yeah, you do bring up a valid point about things that work against the interests of the corporation as a whole. Just like humans who drink or do drugs and harm the whole entire body - freedom is a bitch, which offers benefits & detractions both. The legal fiction of corporations have given those giants "abilities" that humans do not have, but somehow people never got around to doing much to place "restrictions" upon those super-persons - like a human cannot murder another human, so why are corporations allowed to do things like hostile take-overs? And yes, pay their CEOs enormous compensation packages that hurt the corporation overall - should that be allowable, or does that additional "freedom" hurt society, as well as all the humans within the corporation, to a greater degree than it provides any benefits? The EU is placing restrictions upon corporations, and the USA used to do things like have anti-trust lawsuits to hold back the likes of Microsoft e.g. in the infamous browser wars of the 90s, but ever since such laws have not been enforced, making the restrictions weaker and effectively no longer present - inept and hobbled - by design of course.
i.e. that "trick in Modern Capitalism" is on purpose, by those who wish to make use of those tricks, hence put them into the law to begin with, and constantly fiddle with the laws to keep them and tune them further towards their liking.
I do disagree though that corporations are nothing to worry about - they might have been such when they were first growing up, but now their might literally rivals that of many countries, and furthermore they are starting to hollow out the actual governments of literal nations in order to control them parasitically from within. Imagine a man holding a sword and also a small knife - yes the abstract idea of a "corporation" may only be the sword, and yes he still has a small knife (plus whatever other tricks up his sleeve, including his own hands, feet, and whatever else), but even so... it would be foolish to ignore the sword that is currently pointed at you. Likewise, a literal child could pick up the sword and do GREAT damage with it (e.g. Elon Musk). So it is not that humans are dangerous and that corporations are not, it is that both offer their unique challenges, as well as tbf probably some benefits to society as well. However, the balance seems to have been lost, just like with guns in the USA, wherever everyone and their brother can run around with them unchecked, and despite how many people continue to die on a DAILY basis (including literal fucking CHILDREN!!!), those who enjoy using (read: abusing) the power of such do not want limitations or restrictions to be placed upon them, and in fact continue to work to remove those whenever possible.
e.g. Trump - among many other things - lowered the budgets of the organizations that police fraud (the Securities and Exchange Commission), and what you are allowed to get away with saying on television (FCC), and regulations on what train companies must uphold. Therefore now, mere months later to watch MULTIPLE train derailments happen across the nation... strains credibility to think that those deregulation events and the subsequent derailments are entirely unconnected. i.e. humans, using corporations, reach into the realm of government and alter the rules to work better for those Giants and less well for mere Humans overall. And since corporations control such a large fraction of the wealth in this country, which can pass between humans even when they die, they seem to be taking on an increasingly prominent role in Western society. Not entirely but semi-independently of the humans that run them. e.g. even if all of the current CEOs were to die, and even if we threw in all forms of all upper management, then just how much would it do, really, to stem the evil tide of greed that they push upon us, when their whole entire and literal purpose in being is to generate profits, with no real restrictions on "ethics" or even things like "sustainability" that affect profits in a more long-term rather than strictly short-term sense? The adult dies, a child picks up the sword, and continues the trend - at some point the issue is the sword-wielder, but at another level of abstraction it is the sword itself? Therefore perhaps restrictions should be placed upon it, e.g. you perhaps should not be allowed to draw out a sword when you are in the presence of valuable things like museums or schools or in the company of a king - they have their uses, in the proper time & place, but why should anarchy reign supreme in all places, just b/c those who have chosen to become sword-wielders say that it should?
I've worked in all sizes of company, including major corporations.
Internally they're a mess of interests, the carrot of money and the stick of dismissal mostly keeping people in line but those tools only work for things that can be measured (and there are oh so many ways to put one's personal upsides above the company's with little or no risk of detection) and mainly for people who have little power (upper management has long figured out ways to subvert the supposed surveillace of the board).
At the most you could compare Corporations to the Mafia - the aggregated pressures of the interests, punishement and rewards mechanisms within them means certain things when wished by those with enough power get executed, but it's still the the bosses choosing who gets wacked: they're mechanisms for execution of somebody's will (mainly the owners and high level management) but they don't actually chose what gets executed.
Personal legal liability would both remove the de facto immunity of the decision makers within corporation and the willingness of those in the machinery of the corporation to execute actions which are illegal, but as you so well pointed out the laws that created this form of corporation have been created exactly for corporations to operate as they do and keep getting adjusted to keep things the same.
(Also note how immunity for people within the mechanism which is the State works in pretty much the same way as with corporations. Actually in my professional experience the internal social and behavioural patterns that sit behind so many of the problems pointed out in the Public Sector are exactly the same in Private companies which have Monopoly or Cartel market positions - it's just how humans behave in a content of having power with weak oversight, which in the case of the Private sector happens when a company has no real competition and can thus grow fat and lazy)
I would say that corporations should be seen and treated as explosives: something that can be used to do good things but which also gives those who want to do harm the means to do so. In this framework corporations by themselves would have no legal power or personhood because they would be treated as just tools and it would be those yielding those tools who get the full responsability.
Instead you see neoliberals (i.e the plutocrats) doing the exact opposite: corporations are treated as better and more important than people and we're constantly getting told by those politicians about how important it is to do what's "better for businesses", never ever with the condition that only businesses which are good for people will get our support.
But then there are two main vehicles - these days - to power: government and money. In the olden days, there used to be physical strength, but what can compare with e.g. the powers of nukes & greed? Democratic governments, when implemented correctly, provide an internal system of checks & balances, and forces people (like HRC) to still try to, or at least make a minimally-convincing outward appearance of, competing against their "opponents". Corporations, on the other hand, just have to keep raking in the dough, and quite frankly as we saw with Reddit not even that really.
Also, for all the mouth-noises that people make about "voting with your wallets" - how can a normal, non-Giant human being "vote" when it comes to going toe-to-toe with the big Giants? Even Elon Musk strongly leveraged Tesla in order to purchase ~~Twitter~~ X. Like if we e.g. wanted to see more space exploration, I suppose "all we have to do" is pull ourselves up by our boostraps and go there, beating out the likes of Bezos & Musk etc. along the way, i.e. somehow do MOAR than them, b/c when they went they had the actual help of the USA government, but now we are supposed to do it against the gradient of their anti-competitive business practices? Those quoted phrases are ~~"alternative facts"~~ lies.
Government at least can exist without the might of corporate greed digging into it. And even if not quite yet, soon corporations will be able to exist independently of governments as well - e.g. when AI comes more to fruition and workforces are no longer needed. Though personal ~~slaves~~ workers may still hold some appeal, for awhile, until they too can be replaced. By virtue of tying a democratic government to the welfare of its constituents, however loosely, I still think democracy aka oligarchy wins out over corporations that exist solely to feed their capitalistic greed, in terms of morality. If only just barely. Therefore I like your analogies e.g. about explosives:-) - some people do not want to have any restrictions placed upon them whatsoever, but those tend to be the absolute worst people of all, in any system (government or business):-(.
bUt ThE eCoNoMy ThOuGh! :-|